Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all over the
world about parenting, good communication and building strong family relationships.
In this video I'm going to talk about how to discipline a teenage girl.
In this video we're going to be talking about how hormonal teenage girls might be processing and why
we might be finding a few problems with their behavior and then what we can do to help them
fix those behavior problems. Teenage girls are at a very unique phase. In fact they are really
often given a bad rap. People will say oh they're so emotional you know or they're so dramatic or
whatever it is and as much as we don't want to give people excuses for misbehavior,
we do have to understand that there are a lot of hormonal things that are going on with teenage
girls. There are tons of changes happening in their body, chemical levels that are altering sometimes
daily with growth and all stuff with all their hormones that are adjusting all the time plus
there's all the other new things that are coming in such as feelings of love and attraction and
then there's stress and you know when a child is used to being say really smart in one subject and
then they hit puberty and all of a sudden they're like how come I can't do math anymore or something
because they're feeling a little bit dingy because their hormone levels are changing their
thought processes and everything else, it can be really frustrating. Also they usually get
more responsibilities because now they're older. So they're worried about money,
they're worried about doing things around the house, having enough time for all of the school
work that they have to do, all those kinds of things you know. So, there's a lot riding on them
and they're feeling all these changes happen at the same time. They're more tired than they used to
be i mean there's just a lot going on and so with that extra tiredness, the extra hormonal changes,
the increased responsibility and stress, this really just translates to grumpiness sometimes
and when we have a grumpy teenager, then we oftentimes feel very annoyed by a grumpy teenager.
Nobody likes to be around somebody who's a wet blanket all the time. We want somebody to be
around us who's enjoyable who can work as part of the group and not whine or complain or be dramatic,
come up with excuses which are oftentimes things that can happen with teenage girls who are feeling
the pressures of their situation weighing down on them. So what can we do to help them out because
I think we really need to think about this problem in a more productive way than just how
do we stop them. You know it's not a battle. When we're parenting our children, it's not a battle.
We're teaching them. We're supposed to be teaching them the skills that they need for success and
these teenage girls need skill development and I know this because I've raised four children of my
own, two boys, two girls but also for many years, I brought in treatment foster children. They were all
between the ages of 12 and 18 and the majority of them were girls. I've had my fair share of teenage
puberty stricken girls who also had behavior problems and I can tell you that they're
not the enemy, that we need to help them recognize what they're really battling
and it's not the parent. They're really battling a lot of habit, they're battling some drama, some
stress, we need to give them the skills they need to succeed and that's what I'd like to
talk about today. I have several tips I'd like to share with you so that you can better discipline
your teenage daughter but before we talk about those, click on the subscribe button now.
There are a lot of great videos on this channel that pertain to discipline to self-government
and empowerment of our youth and you will not want to miss those so click subscribe now. If
there is one thing that can defuse almost any problem and open the heart of a teenage girl
it's letting them know that they're understood, that somebody cares and understands. Lots of the
reason that they shut down or that they start to get grumpy or mean or rude is because they feel
like nobody cares, nobody knows, nobody understands. I remember vividly as a teenager who had attitude
problems thinking my mom doesn't understand. She has no idea and I remember even telling her you
don't understand and then you know what she said oh yes, I do. I was a teenager before. I understand
and it was just a battle and I was like no, she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand where
I'm coming from because she's just trying to fight me. She's not really listening and if there is one
thing that our teenage girls need is somebody to listen. Do you know they put so much on themselves?
Makes me want to cry when I think about it. All of the stress, the anxiety, the perfectionism,
comparing themselves to everybody else, that boy likes me and I don't like him or that boy
doesn't like me and I do like him or and all these different things and they're wondering if they can
turn out and all the pressures that they see on the media that they're processing that we don't
know how they're processing because we have adult brains, we have more experience so we just carry on
but they're starting to feel like you know is life even worth living? I mean there's a lot of
stuff that our young people are dealing with that we sometimes don't even know and it just comes
out in like attitude or misbehavior or defiance. But our girls need to know we're there for them.
They need to know we truly understand, they've got to have a good relationship so we need to have
the relationship as one of our key focuses. In order to create a good relationship, everybody
needs to know who they are in the family and in that relationship. They need to know their role. For
years now, in fact well over 20 years now, I have been teaching the principles of self-government
and I even wrote books and courses on how to teach children the skills that they need
to be able to govern themselves and to correct problems, which we're going to be hitting on some
of those. I realized after just teaching for a few years that there was a piece of information
that many people were missing that I thought that they had and that was the understanding of roles.
So I wrote this book, Roles: The Secret to Family, Business and Social Success, and it's actually
a story of a family who don't quite have a good enough understanding of who they are to each other
and how to improve their connection and their relationships through better understanding
roles. There's two ways that you can use this book. You can either read it yourself and then
have the conversations that the parents in this book have with their teenage children or
you can read it with your teenage daughter and then talk about what the family is discussing,
talk about the rules, talk about the better ways to communicate, talk about the relationships,
discuss it openly, deliberately, that could be the starting place for you so that instead of
just leaving a whole bunch of things understood and assuming that she knows how much you care
when it's not super obvious right now to her at least but you get the opportunity to express that
and to maybe start over, have a fresh slate. One more tip about roles and that is that we have
to maintain the roles. Once we talk about who we are that you know you as the mother maybe are
the heart and hearthstone of the family, you're a nurturer to your children, the father, he is a
person who provides and protects his children. What he exposes himself to in front of the children
will either make his children protected or it will make them vulnerable. Dads don't always get that
but they actually are that example especially to teenage children. They look to dad for
that. They also look to mom for comfort and for direction pointing and all that kind of stuff. So
we need to make sure we understand who each other is. Do they know what it means to be a 15 year old
daughter? Well then we got to make sure we talk about that. One of the key attributes of a 15 year
old daughter is a learner. She is learning and we've got to maintain that teacher, learner role
differentiation so that we can maintain parental authority and we can properly guide her along so
that she can accomplish all the things that she needs to. Don't manipulate your teenage daughter.
If you try to use emotion to control her, if you try to instill fear into her, she will immediately
not trust you. Your teaching and correcting, your disciplining needs to be done with a feeling
of honesty. Super important. There needs to be a predictableness to it so that she knows oh they
really are just helping me out here. They're not trying to control me or lie to me or just make
me afraid of them but they're actually trying to help. This means that you need to set up an
environment in your home where they know these are the skills we all use and if I don't use
these skills like how to follow instruction or disagree appropriately or similar such skills as
I teach in my teaching self-government parenting course then this is the skill set that dad will
use or that mom will use to correct me and these are the exact words that will be said to me. These
are the negative consequences that I will get the opportunity to earn if I choose to but never
will it be about them just trying to hurt me. If your teenage daughter feels like your correction
is trying to hurt her, she will not trust you. She will back away from you and that will hurt
your relationship. If your relationship's damaged then none of the teaching sticks.
She may occasionally go along with some of it because she wants to just get you out of her hair
but she will not feel like she's following your example and she needs to follow your
example in order to truly find happiness. I mean provided you're setting the right example.
So, no manipulation, honesty, predictability, that means everyone knows what's going to
be said and how problems are going to be solved ahead of time, that means that you need skills.
In my teaching self-government parenting course, I teach multiple skills. Four basic skills for
children, skills for calmness, skills for the parents to use to correct the problems, skills
for meeting together and making plans together, lots of different skills that you can use. You
can just take them into your family and have them be part of your family culture. Then once
you have those skills, one of the most important things you can do to help your teenage daughter
is to be firm and consistent in your correcting and in your praising. So, all of your teaching
moments should be consistent and you should have firmness so maintain those roles and authority.
Make sure that she knows she will get corrected, she won't be able to get away with some of these
misbehaviors. It actually hurts our daughters if they spend their time trying to circumvent system,
it helps them most when they bond to us. Girls more than anyone, I mean everyone needs bonding
but girls truly do need to feel valued and when they are in their teen years, they wonder what
their value is. But when they see a parent work hard, take the time to be calm and to
do corrective teaching to them, they actually are transformed. So, help your daughter by learning the
skills that you need to correct her and then by consistently doing it. I have a free class that
I would like to give you In fact I think that's the next video you should watch it's called the
not so known secret for parenting success. Click on the link to that video now and you will learn many
more skills that you can use to govern yourself and to help your daughter govern herself as well.